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This paper reviews the state of the field of the sub-disciplines within UK management research, based upon the submissions of 94 UK higher education institutions to the Business and Management Studies Panel in the UK's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It offers observations on the UK model of the assessment of quality in, and funding of, research conducted in publicly funded higher education institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marks & Spencer (M&S) was one of the world's great retailers, enjoying legendary and iconic status, being often held up as one of the best managed and admired businesses in the world. Its ‘fall from grace’ has been spectacular and dramatic and the company is currently fighting for its life. Based on extensive in-depth interviews with company managers and utilizing a case-study approach, this paper provides an exploratory study into failure at M&S and presents this in the context of the wider literature on organizational and managerial failure. It concludes that whilst external factors in the various trading environments affected the business, there were internal aspects of the crisis which exacerbated the situation and the problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies partner selection criteria in a sample of UK international joint ventures with Western European, US and Japanese partners. Rankings of selection criteria are derived for the sample using a typology that distinguishes between task- related and partner-related selection criteria. The most important task-related criteria are found to be access to knowledge of local market, access to distribution channels, access to links with major buyers and access to knowledge of local culture. The most important partner-related selection criteria are trust between the top management teams, relatedness of partner's business and reputation. A parsimonious set of selection criteria for the sample is provided by means of factor analysis. Hypotheses are tested on the relationship between the relative importance of selection criteria and a number of characteristics of the sample - partner nationality, industry of the joint venture, joint-venture purpose, geographical location of the venture, initial approach for joint-venture formation and relative partner size. The greatest variation in the relative importance of selection criteria occurs with the geographic location of the joint venture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For 1948, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research published a list of the 100 largest quoted companies in the United Kingdom. A comparable list has been prepared for 1968, with the assistance of the Statistics Division of the Department of Trade and industry, and the object of this paper is to compare the two population of companies. The companies covered in this study are the largest zoo companies whose ordinary or preference shares were quoted on United Kingdom stock exchanges at the relevant time. Companies whose trading activities were primarily outside the United Kingdom are excluded, as are consolidated subsidiary companies of companies which are already included in the list. Companies engaged primarily in banking, finance, insurance, investment, property and shipping are also excluded. The above definitions are inevitably arbitrary. Their main objective is to define a fairly homogeneous population of quoted companies, engaged primarily in manufacturing and distribution within the United Kingdom, and to select the too largest from this population.

Policy PointsNudges steer people toward certain options but also allow them to go their own way. "Dark nudges" aim to change consumer behavior against their best interests. "Sludge" uses cognitive biases to make behavior change more difficult.We have identified dark nudges and sludge in alcohol industry corporate social responsibility (CSR) materials. These undermine the information on alcohol harms that they disseminate, and may normalize or encourage alcohol consumption.Policymakers and practitioners should be aware of how dark nudges and sludge are used by the alcohol industry to promote misinformation about alcohol harms to the public. Context: "Nudges" and other behavioral economic approaches exploit common cognitive biases (systematic errors in thought processes) in order to influence behavior and decision‐making. Nudges that encourage the consumption of harmful products (for example, by exploiting gamblers' cognitive biases) have been termed "dark nudges." The term "sludge" has also been used to describe strategies that utilize cognitive biases to make behavior change harder. This study aimed to identify whether dark nudges and sludge are used by alcohol industry (AI)–funded corporate social responsibility (CSR) organizations, and, if so, to determine how they align with existing nudge conceptual frameworks. This information would aid their identification and mitigation by policymakers, researchers, and civil society. Methods: We systematically searched websites and materials of AI CSR organizations (e.g., IARD, Drinkaware, Drinkwise, Éduc'alcool); examples were coded by independent raters and categorized for further analysis. Findings: Dark nudges appear to be used in AI communications about "responsible drinking." The approaches include social norming (telling consumers that "most people" are drinking) and priming drinkers by offering verbal and pictorial cues to drink, while simultaneously appearing to warn about alcohol harms. Sludge, such as the use of particular fonts, colors, and design layouts, appears to use cognitive biases to make health‐related information about the harms of alcohol difficult to access, and enhances exposure to misinformation. Nudge‐type mechanisms also underlie AI mixed messages, in particular alternative causation arguments, which propose nonalcohol causes of alcohol harms. Conclusions: Alcohol industry CSR bodies use dark nudges and sludge, which utilize consumers' cognitive biases to promote mixed messages about alcohol harms and to undermine scientific evidence. Policymakers, practitioners, and the public need to be aware of how such techniques are used to nudge consumers toward industry misinformation. The revised typology presented in this article may help with the identification and further analysis of dark nudges and sludge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article gives the first large-scale assessment of business partnerships in England and Wales using business records within the population census for 1881. It seeks to understand the variety of ways that 'partnership' was used: explicit partnership, 'de facto' partnership, 'joint' activity, and asset ownership together. The article confirms that partnerships were chiefly between two people. Complexity and transaction costs largely precluded larger size and squeezed the partnership into a 'middle ground' between the sole proprietor and the corporation. The main size contrast was between farms with small employee numbers, and larger non-farm business partnerships. Generally differences in the gender of business owners have greater salience than sectors. Few female business partnerships employed more than four people (mean 3.4), while male partnerships ranged up to several thousand employees (mean 33.6), and 18.6 for mixed gender. While many women were involved in businesses, their opportunities remained restricted, and most were in partnership with male partners. Family structures were important, with three-quarters of all identifiable partnerships having some form of family relationship, with a strong preponderance of single women in female-only partnerships, married men in male-only partnerships, and widows in mixed gender businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK's regulators and accounting profession are at one in their assessment of why the UK avoided its Enron: the UK's approach to accounting regulation is principles-based in contrast to the rules-based approach taken in the United States. According to this position, the UK has its principles-based regulatory technique to thank for keeping the integrity of its markets intact during the infectious greed of the 1990s. This article is an inquiry into the effect and validity of this claim. It investigates the effect that this claim has had upon structuring the UK's post-Enron regulatory process and provides a close analysis of UK and US accounting regulation to determine whether the UK's regulation is in fact distinctively principles-based. It concludes that the structuring effect of the claim was considerable, diverting the reform process away from some of the US's most important Enron lessons. This is of particular concern as the article also concludes that the claim is without foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report examines the relevance gap in management research. Its focus is the nature of knowledge created by research at the interface between business and academia in the context of major changes likely to affect the nature of demand for such knowledge. Management research has been accused of a lack of relevance to managerial practice and of too narrow a discipline base. The report examines the conditions giving rise to this criticism, in the UK and elsewhere, and identifies an important strategic need to increase the stakeholding of users in various aspects of the research and knowledge creation and dissemination process. The report concludes with recommendations concerning new forms of research partnership and research training that will address the relevance gap. However, bridging this gap does not only require changes in the academic mind-set. Managers and firms too need to rethink their involvement in the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author makes a point-by-point comments on a critique by Julia A. Smith of his study on businessmen and land ownership in the late nineteenth century Britain. He first commented on Smith's reluctance to see the "Dictionary of business biography" as a collection of business biographies that can stand as a credible source for investigation patterns of wealth and land holding when combined with other data. He also pointed out that he and Smith used different samples which led to Smith's detection of a larger proportion of businessmen landowners.

The article comments on entrepreneurship in Great Britain during the late Victorian period. In using the total factor productivity index to analyse late-Victorian entrepreneurship, two propositions are confronted. The first is that the late-Victorian economy was characterized by perfectly competitive product and factor markets and by an efficient allocation of resources. The second is that the measured residual derives from the effects of the activities of entrepreneurs. The purpose of what has gone before has been to show that at the theoretical level, whether approached from theories of entrepreneurship or from the body of neoclassical theory, these two propositions are contradictory. The competitive equilibrium assumption necessary to justify using factor shares as the relevant partial elasticities creates a world in which entrepreneurs of whatever variety have no function and indeed cannot exist. It follows that whatever is measured by the residual, and it has already been pointed to its rag-bag nature, entrepreneurship is excluded by the assumptions which are made in order to generate it.

The article presents a list of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland. Some of the publications are--"Examination Roll of Arbroath," edited by F. Davidson, "Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History: 1770-1980," by A. Armstrong, "The Diffusion of Vetches in Medieval England," by B.M.S. Campbell, "Horses in Shakespeare's England," by A. Dent, "Countryside Planning in Practice the Scottish Experience," edited by P.H. Selman, "The Growth of the London Carrying Trade: 1681-1838," by D. Gerhold, "The British Iron Industry: 1700-1850," by J.R. Harris, "Business, Banking and Politics: The Case of British Steel, 1918-1939," by S. Tolliday" and others.

This article examines the effect of financial restraints in banks on the growth of firms in the cotton industry in Great Britain from 1790 to 1850. V.A.C. Gatrell's recent article "Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century," published in the journal "Economic History Review," draws attention to a neglected body of evidence which shows the predominance of small to middle firms and single-process firms in these sections of the industry in 1840. The statistics are evidently reliable. He argues that the technology of spinning and power-loom weaving offered no substantial incentives to growth beyond a modest size, and suggests that entrepreneurs of the period believed in the advantages of moderation in enterprise rather than economies of scale. The argument of the present article is that the solution to the problem of stunted growth lies in the relations between manufacturers and merchants and the financial environment in which they struggled for markets. A large and constantly changing body of entrepreneurs, trying to sell increasing quantities to more distant and dispersed markets, was serviced by a financial system whose members were characteristically inexperienced, insecure, and unprepared to meet the unprecedented developments in industry and overseas markets.

This article focuses on the role of professional journals on development of economic ideas in Great Britain. The first half of the century was the era of the reviews, and starting with the Byronic success of the Edinburgh in 1802 they were for many years the most important feature of English periodical literature. Four of these reviews, the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, the Westminster Review, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine--not strictly a review, as it published many items that were not reviews, but dealt with much the same field--stand out above the others from almost any point of view, and certainly from the point of view of the economist. Among the periodicals read by the educated man, they had, year in and year out, the largest circulation and the greatest influence. Ten other reviews started between 1827 and 1850. None of these had the influence of the four major ones, and six had ceased publication by 1850. Further study of the Edinburgh and of the other reviews has strengthened and broadened this feeling. After 1824 the Westminster rendered much the same service for the middle-class reformers and the intellectual radicals as did the Edinburgh for the gentry. The role of the Quarterly and of Blackwood's was less direct, but their continual criticism of the theories and of the policy proposals of political economists at least made the opponents of economic change familiar with the new forces at large in the field of thought and policy.